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Mount(spell)
You summon a light horse or a pony (your choice) to serve you as a mount. The steed serves willingly and well. The mount comes with a bit and bridle and a riding saddle. Material Component A bit of horse hair. Notes Mount is considered by some to be one of the most useful spells for a starting wizard. It summons a large animal usable for a variety of purposes - transport, defense, some potential combat capability - and has a lasting duration. How is such a spell usable in a non-adventuring sense? First things first - on the face of things, it's not necessarily that useful outside of a dungeon. For 10 gp, you can get a horse for two hours, but for 75 gp, you can get a horse forever. Even if you don't have a pressing long-term need for a horse, renting at the local livery stable for 1 or 2 gp a day is probably a better deal than calling up the local wizard. There are a few cases in which a Mount spell might prove useful, however - places where you don't want to have to worry about the quality of the steed when you're done with it, mainly. Military couriers are one example of this - individuals intent on riding their horses to exhaustion or even death, and confident of a changeoff along the line. A reasonably high-magic kingdom might well choose to staff a third- or fourth-level wizard at selected guard posts, ordered to maintain not only a selection of combat spells for local defense but also cast Mount as needed to support the courier service. Another possible example of using such a spell would be to get animal labor in places where feeding or stabling a live animal might not normally be feasible - around a desert oasis, for instance, or in a city located in the high mountains. If the animal is left unfed, exposed to extreme temperatures, overworked, or injured or killed, no matter - the spell can be recast later for a new, fresh animal. Just keep an eye on the spell's duration, and make sure you've finished your work before the spell expires. Note that using the spell for deceptive purposes (selling a summoned horse to the local trader) is probably an obvious enough application to warrant some protections. In some areas, this may be magical countermeasures - attempting to detect magic on sold horses, utilizing divination or truth-sensing magics to weed out cheats, or even targeting a dispel magic effect on horses for sale. (Independent castings would likely be prohibitively expensive; magic items could work better. A Hallow spell would be best of all - and brings to mind an interesting campaign possibility, in which a celebrated horse market has had an area sanctified by clerics of Fharlanghn or another deity of travel, for better business.) Nonmagical methods are also possible - requiring that any horses offered for sale be observed for 12 hours or so before money changes hands, for instance. If the horse pops out of existence before the deadline, the seller is brought up on charges of petty fraud and illegal magic use. This would be reasonably effective for preventing abuse of the Mount spell (stopping fraud by casters of up to 6th level, and a 7th level mage is hopefully beyond such cheap trickery), but does complicate mundane commerce as well as improve opportunities for mundane horse theft. It'd be impossible to provide all the possible compromises or solutions that might be produced and agreed upon in regards to this problem, but some thought should give rise to a few possibilities. Each kingdom and society will probably develop its own rules on this matter, choosing a solution that best meets its needs and protects its interests. Consider this flavor - one kingdom may require a 12-hour waiting period on all horse sales, a second may use magical means to detect summoned frauds, and a third may nationalize the horse market, trusting only known and bonded dealers to sell horseflesh. Another interesting campaign question also relates to exactly how the Mount spell works. Depending on how summoning normal animals works in the campaign, it's entirely possible that the spell abducts a normal horse from its usual existence somewhere in the Prime - and sends it back at the spell's end, in whatever condition it's in. The implications of this are interesting under any circumstances. If the spell pulls horses from some area populated by wild horse herds, then it'll presumably deposit injured or exhausted horses, or horse carcasses, back into this location on a fairly frequent basis. A sharp increase can be expected in the local predator and scavenger populations, with all the concurrent ecological problems. Local druids and rangers are likely to become quite concerned - and frustrated, because the problem is not something they can really do anything about. Nature deities may become involved. It's a thorny question - how do you stop everyone, everywhere, from using a simple 1st-level spell to grab free horses for unpleasant tasks? Even worse, perhaps, is if the summoned horses originally belonged to someone. This is entirely likely - the summoned creatures are reasonably docile, broken to the saddle, and able to perform simple tasks. At this point, we have some poor farmer's horse being whisked away unexpectedly by a sudden magical spell, and returned unfed and uncared for, exhausted, possibly injured, possibly even dead. He's not likely to be too happy. If the local merchants or government are fond of summoning Mounts, he may demand compensation, or a ban on the spell's use. A kingdom whose farmers suffer too greatly from having their horses stolen may try and go to war over the insult. A ruler who does offer to pay for horses summoned by the courier service and ridden to death runs the risk of having the peasants hit him up yearly for every horse that's fallen over dead behind the plow - "one of yer wizards did this, really!" Expect anyone who has a choice in the matter to start using oxen, donkeys, water buffalo, or similar non-horse substitutes. And naturally, the fewer of your neighbors who use horses, the more likely it is that a Mount spell will steal yours. The extreme outcome of this setup is a world in which the only horses used by humans are those summoned up through magic - an odd situation indeed. Whether Mount is really used on a large-scale basis by wizards and rulers in a campaign world is a matter of personal taste. In high-magic worlds, the effects are likely to be far-reaching; of course, high-magic worlds also offer the most possibilities for repairing potential damage. Exactly how far the implications of this go depend on the DM and the campaign setting - this material has hopefully provided a few ideas to think about. Category:Conjuration spells Category:2nd level sorcerer and wizard spells